1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to meeting support integration systems as well as digital pen and paper systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's fast-developing technology is posing a challenge for meeting support systems. On the one hand, more and more tools are incorporated into meetings. The devices used in a normal meeting may include pens, paper pages, projectors, TVs, VHS/DVD players, clocks, printers, light switches, white boards, smart boards, laptops, tablets, PDAs, presentation controllers, reference books, calculators, cameras, pointers, laser pointers, remote controls or even cell phones. On the other hand, it is hard for a meeting participant to learn and recall so many meeting support functions. It is also cumbersome to switch from one support function to another.
There have been multiple attempts to deal with this problem in the past by developing integrated support systems for meeting support, but none of the integrated meeting support systems have solved the problem. Some attempted solutions have used tablet PC, laptop, or desktop PC for providing a meeting support interface, but it was expensive to deploy and hard to carry for daily meetings. Moreover, some meeting participants are reluctant to install control interface on their PCs because of security concerns.
Pen-based meeting support systems date back to the early 1990's, however devices bearing an active writable display (such as tablet PCs and PDAs) can be expensive to deploy. Moreover, those devices can be too large for the users to pass around, hindering users from sharing sketches and notes on them.
As the most historic and convenient media, paper has long been integrated into meetings and offices. There have been a number of research projects that try to link paper with digital devices. One project could control slideshows with barcodes on paper. Another project provided note-taking and paper-guided audio replaying. However, in terms of conference support, those systems are aiming at multimedia meeting minutes provided to participants after the meeting, rather than multimedia control during the meeting.